Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels

Craig Evans, the Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at
Acadia Divinity School in Nova Scotia, is one of the foremost
evangelical New Testament scholars in our world today. Regularly
interviewed for major network documentaries and author of countless
articles and several fine monographs, particularly in the area of
historical Jesus studies, Evans here makes a huge amount of complicated
and controversial material understandable and readily accessible to the
educated layperson and introductory theological student.

Evans' main objective throughout this concise volume is to debunk
the claims of radical, unrepresentative scholarship about Jesus and the
Gospels. Chapters 1-10 each treat, in turn, scholarly cul de sacs and
carefully explain why these dead ends develop. Chapter 11 then helps
the reader piece together the true insights that have emerged from each
previous chapter and more systematically addresses who the real Jesus
was.

Chapter 1 points out how C. S. Lewis' famous "liar, lunatic or Lord"
triad of options excludes at least two main approaches of contemporary
skeptics--those who see him as a prophet, sage or other significant
historical figure because they sift through the Gospels to find a
smaller core of truly authentic material and those who portray him as
quite different from historic Christian claims because they reject all
or nearly all of the canonical accounts as reliable. Using the
published autobiographical reflections of Robert Funk and James
Robinson to illustrate the first category of skepticism, and of Robert
Price and Bart Ehrman as examples of the second, Evans highlights one
recurrent problem--the all-or-nothing approach that leads some people to
think that, if they cannot accept strict biblical inerrancy or
harmonize every last detail in the Gospels, they must reject most or
all of them (a mistake, I might add, sadly perpetuated by many very
conservative evangelicals, too, who thus unwittingly send more hesitant
skeptics over the edge).

Chapter 2 addresses the need for having valid criteria of
authenticity in order to determine if the main contours of the Synoptic
tradition of Jesus are indeed trustworthy. Evans believes that such
standard historical criteria as that which is multiply attested, fits
an early first-century Palestinian environment, would have proved
embarrassing to the early church, or coheres with material
authenticated by other reliable criteria, and so on, are the right
tools for the task.

Evans next devotes two chapters to later extra-canonical "Christian"
texts that paint a dramatically different picture of Jesus than the
canonical Gospels present. Spending an entire chapter on the well-known
Gospel of Thomas, and a second on the Gospel of Peter, Papyrus Egerton,
the Gospel of Mary and the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark, Evans
provides solid reasons for viewing all of these as no earlier than
second century in origin and rarely, if ever, preserving reliable
information about Jesus of any kind, much less data that should be
viewed as more reliable than that found in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.
The one anomaly is Secret Mark, which is, in all probability, not an
ancient document at all but entirely a modern hoax perpetrated by
Morton Smith, as several recent studies have virtually conclusively
demonstrated.

Three chapters in various ways next turn to challenges raised
especially in the 1990s by the Jesus Seminar and continue to be held by
many predisposed toward their conclusions. Was Jesus a Cynic? Not
likely. This was the Greco-Roman school of philosophy that made fewest
inroads of all into Israel, and those elements in the Gospels that
might call to mind a Cynic lifestyle (esp. itinerant teaching with a
very simple lifestyle) contain material that strikingly contrasts with
Cynicism (take no bag for your journey; depend on the
hospitality of others who take you into their homes rather than
begging, etc.). Did Jesus speak just in short pithy proverbs and
enigmatic parables without any contexts preserved? Not likely either.
Nothing we know of any teachers and especially not Jewish teachers in
Jesus' world supports such approaches. Every religious and
philosophical leader made claims about himself and about the future,
including future judgment, so it would be astonishing if the Jesus
Seminar were right that he never addressed such issues. Do we reject
the healings and other miracles attributed to Jesus because of
unsupportable bias against the supernatural? Not if weï¿½re smartï¿½the
miracles as a whole pass the standard criteria of authenticity as well
as any part of the Gospel traditions, and again one can find striking
parallels (with important differences) in other contemporary Jewish
figures like Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Rain-maker (or Circle-drawer).

What about Josephus, the famous late first-century Jewish historian,
who has two famous references to Jesus? Chapter 8 notes that one of
them probably does have a few later Christian interpolations, but not
enough to call into question its basic corroborative value. More
importantly, Josephus' extensive testimony about the Herodian family
and about Pontius Pilate dovetails, sometimes in detail and usually in
spirit, with what we read about those characters in the Gospels. The
story of Jesus ben Ananias in the 60s depicts another prophetic figure
whose preaching so irked the Jewish authorities that they initiated a
sequence of events strikingly parallel to those that the New Testament
depicts surrounding Christ's death.

What of the claim so oft-repeated by Ehrman and others that "lost
Christianities" give a quite different picture than the Bible does and
that the New Testament itself is filled with too much theological
disunity to be believed? Again, Evans shows how there is simply no
evidence to date the New Testament documents later than the first
century or "heretical" forms of the faith earlier than the second (and
usually not earlier than the late second) century. All of the
latter developments were deviations from and mutations of first-century
faith, which displays a fundamental unity across all the New Testament
documents with respect to core beliefs.

Finally Evans debunks the popular novelists of whom Dan Brown (with his DaVinci Code)
is hardly the only, just the best known, who revise history often to
create a Jesus or an early Christianity radically unlike anything that
can be supported by actual history.

Turning to the positive case for the nature of Jesus that a broad
swath of the so-called third quest of the historical Jesus would
endorse, Evans places Jesus squarely within an early first-century
Palestinian Jewish framework and milieu. He believed his mission was to
restore Israel as the heaven-sent Son of man of Daniel 7:13 and the
miracle-working Son of David and Jewish Messiah of numerous prophecies.
He crossed an invisible boundary between humanity and the divine in
claiming to sit at God's right hand and come on the clouds of heaven
(Mark 14:62), akin to Yahweh's very own chariot-throne in Ezekiel 1 and
elsewhere. He claimed to mediate divine forgiveness apart from the
priestly system and the temple cult, ultimately predicting his own
death and resurrection. Resurrection, in turn, becomes the heart of
Christian faith and preaching.

Two appendices briefly discuss other sayings of Jesus not found in
the canonical Gospels and then the Gospel of Judas. Fuller endnotes and
indices than typically found in books of this size and genre enable
readers to follow up with bibliographies of more technical literature
and help the casual peruser to locate numerous topics (or Scriptures)
of interest quickly. A glossary also defines key terms.

I find nothing of any substance with which to disagree in this
volume and commend it heartily to all those interested in accessible
writing and accurate history on any or all of the topics it surveys. If
all scholars were as sensible and judicious as Evans in his historical
judgments, we would not have the confusion and disarray either in the
scholarly world of biblical studies or among laypeople unwittingly "suckered" by the distortions and inventions of the far-left wing. Buy
this book, read it carefully, and help spread the news of what really
happened in Christian origins and with Jesus of Nazareth.